There have been a ton of helpful and interesting tips posted to Tipster recently, so I thought we’d pull a few out for you all (and give the submitters a bit of well-deserved publicity).

Topics that we’re covering are: MySQL, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, JQuery, life hacks and server admin.

MySQL Geo Search

Here’s a MySQL statement to search for nearest objects to you in a database, ‘lat’ & ‘lng’ are fields in the ‘items’ table with the location of object and $latitude & $longitude are the users location. The distance field will be the calculated distance in Km between the user and the object:

SELECT *,(((acos(sin((".$latitude."*pi()/180)) * sin((`lat`*pi()/180))+cos((".$latitude."*pi()/180)) * cos((`lat`*pi()/180)) * cos(((".$longitude."- `lng`)*pi()/180))))*180/pi())*60*1.1515*1.609344) as distance FROM `items` ORDER BY distance;

By: Sam Machin
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Transparent background images - PNG fix for IE6 - a few reminders

When using the MS filter (via The AlphaImageLoader) to fix PNG transparency for IE6 â